Ed spends his life in white space.

They do field work, missions, whatever name people think up for it at that moment, and life is busy and thoughtless. He is intent, he is purpose. He is no longer human but a process, a means barrelling towards an end.

Those are the sentences in his story. Period. And then a white space so that the metaphorical reader can breathe, read without being tripped over the words.

He spends his free time, his white space, in the library. There's a dorm room as well, but he has little to do there but sleep, spend time with his brother, dream. He tries not to dream, has tried not to since a reversed monster of his mother gasped for air and reached a hand into his skull. He can still feel it there when he thinks to examine it, fingernails pressing through bone.

Books are an acceptable alternative.

He doesn't read fiction - at least, not real fiction. Comic books are an acceptable alternative, shallow, easily digested, easily forgotten, like how he appears to others. To people who don't know. He wonders if they run deeper, but refuses to look. It hurts, when you dig below the surface.

What he reads when he wants to vanish are texts. They're old books, bookworms inching through their pages, decaying them. That is also a process. There is creation, decay, and then nothing. The value isn't lost, but it's changed into something ephemeral, unreal, made of memory.

He reads alchemical studies, overall; none of the other sciences interest him. He is a creature of action, motion, and how else can he vanish unless he reads of his own art and self? Success. Failure.

I commenced first my operations with putrefactions of the Body of this material over a period of nine months but this came to naught. I placed it in the bain-made for lengthy periods, erring just the same. I took and placed it in the calcinating fire for three months and proceeded awry. All sorts and kinds of distillation and sublimation spoken of, or apparently spoken of by the Philosophers - Geber, Archelaus, and almost any other - have I attempted and tried, and found equally nothing.

The overwrought words take him, chew him up, spit him out, and before he knows, it's time to move again.

He's eager, he's always eager, and as he waits to catch the next train out, he chats with his brother. Al says something funny; he lifts his fingers to his face to hide a smile and smells dust caught on his gloves, the scent of books in decay.

It isn't a bad smell.